Hello,
As you probably know, with SharePoint you have two options for installation: SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013. You can read about these two options in my previous posts SharePoint 2013 Foundation edition and SharePoint 2013 Server edition. In this post, I would like to summarize the earlier posts and help you make the right choice between these SharePoint editions.

SharePoint 2013 Editions Short Overview

Let`s take a look at a short SharePoint 2013 editions overview to refresh the key points of these SharePoint editions.

SharePoint 2013 Foundation Overview

Document management and collaboration are the core features with SharePoint 2013 Foundation. With Foundation, end-users can easy create collaboration sites, so it`s a very popular collaborative tool for teams. Users can create a new site based on an existing SharePoint template in just a few seconds without the need for additional code.

SharePoint 2013 Server Overview

The more advanced features for business and team collaboration are included in SharePoint 2013 Server. With SharePoint Server, you can improve business process management, content management and business intelligence for your organization. SharePoint Server is the tool to create, publish and manage content across the intranet, extranet and Internet. Since SharePoint Server integrates easily with Microsoft Office applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook, users can share content more easily using a familiar environment.

SharePoint 2013 Edition Choice

It is common for many organizations to have a SharePoint environment. In many cases, it`s an easy choice to start with SharePoint 2013 Foundation edition and focus only on collaboration tasks. Once your needs become more advanced, you can upgrade SharePoint Foundation to one of the SharePoint Server options. Our company, PlexHosted, offers free migration to PlexHosted SharePoint services as well as upgrade in a SharePoint environment at any time you need it.

An Intranet is an internal company portal that can be used to make team work more productive, effortless, cost effective and competitive. It is an essential part of the organization’s infrastructure. A successful SharePoint intranet usually has high usability because company owners have full control over the environment and know exactly who the users are and how they actually use intranet. Investments in intranet improvements are crucial since the intranet usability and high user adoption helps improve business productivity and therefore increase overall company profits.

SharePoint Intranet

SharePoint is one of the most widely used application platforms for a company’s intranet portal. According to the Nielsen Norman Group`s research, 70% of successful intranets are built on SharePoint. Additionally, Nielsen Norman Group determines 10 best intranet portals every year and the best ones for 2013 are:

These companies are of different sizes and from different countries. These intranets are used for their entire organizations and have been designed to take into consideration specific company needs in their particular sphere of business.
To read about these companies please see the following page – 2013 Intranet Design Award Winners.

This research helps to specify the latest trends in the development of successful intranet portals. Let’s take a look at them.

Time for intranet design – the average time to create and design a portal is 3.5 years, but lately it has decreased to 2.3 years. The process of designing a company portal is not a simple task.

The size of an organization – it has become simpler for small companies to develop good company portals using modern technologies. The SharePoint platform provides a number of features for great intranet implementation with its social features, efficient MS Office integration, information search and filtering capabilities.

Intranet management team – nowadays it is important to involve more people in building a successful intranet site. It is impossible for a small team to design and manage an intranet portal that will completely satisfy the needs of all company employees and help improve collaboration and work productivity. The more people involved in the building process – the better the result will be for end users.

Consulting companies and developers – external consultants are usually involved in helping with SharePoint planning, development, design and branding. They serve to complete particular tasks in which your company`s team does not have enough expertise.

The authors of intranet content – it is important to consider the primary requirements of the employees when designing the intranet. The best way to ensure usability, high user adoption rates and relevant content inside the portal is to involve people from different offices and departments, the people who will use the site.

Feature and design development – the latest trend in intranets is to use such features as personalized pages, extended profiles, video channels and mega menus. The additional new features widely used are integration with social sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, and extended filters on site pages.

Educating employees about social and enterprise features of the platform – intranet users need to know the main usage rules and it is a good idea to provide a short guideline for them. It is also important to establish communication between teams and motivate users for commenting, sharing and creating conversations.

Permissions – complex site permissions can be a nightmare for your intranet management team. Nowadays most of the companies tend to protect business critical files by using simple permission strategies to avoid the unnecessary complexity.

The practice of a great number of companies from all over the world shows that the SharePoint platform is a perfect tool for designing a company’s intranet portal. Taking into consideration the latest trends, advances from SharePoint consultants and experienced users, you can build a powerful portal for your team and achieve better results.PlexHosted can provide you with a starting point for your successful intranet. From the planning stage, to SharePoint implementation and customization – this is something PlexHosted can help you with.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!

SharePoint 2013 Server Edition

SharePoint 2013 Server extends the features available in the SharePoint 2013 Foundation edition. SharePoint 2013 Server provides you with a higher level of functionality, see SharePoint 2013 features. The more important features are described in this post.

SharePoint 2013 Server Features

SharePoint Server Enterprise services. SharePoint enterprise services provide with the best way to quickly and easily create custom solutions with Microsoft Office 2013. It includes Info Path Services, Excel Services, Visio Services, Access Services and PerformancePoint Services. If you do not need these services but need services for social collaboration you can choose the SharePoint 2013 Standard plan that is cheaper than the SharePoint Enterprise plan (please keep in mind that these two plans are usually referred to as SharePoint Server edition).

SharePoint Server Advanced Search. The basic functionality is included to SharePoint Foundation 2013 and with SharePoint Server 2013 you can get a more flexible environment to make sure your users will find the information they need.

SharePoint Server Publishing. SharePoint 2013 Server supports web content creation as well as publishing it to the Internet.

SharePoint Server Social features. Social networking is everywhere now and it’s an expected capability for many platforms. In SharePoint 2013 Server it has been much improved. Social features like rating, tagging and others help users find the content that will work for them best. Communication is an essential option in the business world.

As we can see SharePoint 2013 Server includes the more advanced features that can be very useful for company’s business. It can accelerate the adoption of content management and business intelligence across intranet portals and Internet web-sites.SharePoint 2013 Server is ideal for mid-sized companies looking to improve their employees’ ability to work with each other in more effective ways than offered by SharePoint Foundation.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!

Hello,
As you probably know, with SharePoint you have two options for installation: SharePoint 2013 Foundation and SharePoint 2013 Server. In this post I want to tell about the SharePoint 2013 Foundation edition.

SharePoint 2013 Foundation Edition

SharePoint 2013 Foundation provides you with the basic SharePoint collaboration features which are fundamental and required to build collaboration and communication sites for your company. With SharePoint 2013 Foundation you can move all documents from a stored version to the Internet and improve document management. It’s interesting, isn’t it? If so, you can learn about the major features of SharePoint Foundation platform at this post.

SharePoint 2013 Foundation Features

SharePoint Foundation Collaboration. SharePoint Foundation sites offer access to information located in one place. Your company’s employees can share information regardless of their location by using a user-friendly interface. SharePoint Foundation libraries are the best place for documents rather than standard file sharing solutions.

SharePoint Foundation Security. With role-based security settings you can be sure that important information is secure and available only for people with permission to use it.

SharePoint Foundation Development. You can use a lot of SharePoint Foundation default templates to get the functionality you need. There are templates for creating wikis, blogs and other social sites available with SharePoint Foundation.

SharePoint Foundation Using. Since SharePoint Foundation provides integration with Microsoft Office. Employees can use MS Word and other Office products to create and manage documents. As such they will work in a familiar environment and make it easy to adopt the SharePoint environment.

In short, SharePoint Foundation represents the basic content storage and collaboration features of SharePoint. With PlexHosted SharePoint 2013 Foundation edition you can get a SharePoint Foundation site in a few minutes, save time on implementation, and save money since the price are greatly reduced.
SharePoint 2013 Foundation is ideal for small companies looking to improve their employees’ ability to work with each other in a secure, easy-to-use platform for collaboration.

Start with the PlexHosted SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!

Hello,
Do you want to use a no-code business solution that will save the money normally spent on developing custom code? It’s available right now! The pre-packed features already available in a SharePoint platform have a number of great no-code business solutions that will benefit your company. All you need to know to start working with SharePoint is how best to install, manage, and use SharePoint platform.

If you are not an IT guy, haven`t previously managed servers, or have never participated in the SharePoint installation process, I would recommend that you take a look at SharePoint hosting providers. At PlexHosted you can get a ready-to-go SharePoint environment in a couple of hours, not days!

Understanding dedicated SharePoint Hosting

As you know a dedicated SharePoint hosting solution is more expensive than multi-tenant SharePoint hosting. So there is a question: “Why would we need dedicated SharePoint hosting?” To answer this question we need to understand one important thing – the purpose of using SharePoint and SharePoint features.

The power of SharePoint as a no-code business solution allows companies to customize their SharePoint site by adding on pre-packaged third-party solutions to fit the company’s specific needs. SharePoint dedicated hosting allows you to build specific sites and provide your users with those specific features for data sharing and collaboration. As a result, SharePoint sites or SharePoint portals can be customized specifically for your company.

Dedicated SharePoint hosting benefits

Below you can find a few of the answers to your question “Why would we need dedicated SharePoint hosting?”

The end-user could have a simple SharePoint 2013 site that is easy-to-access and easy-to-use. This site will help them find and to do their tasks best.

A company’s employees can get access to urgent or important information from everywhere via the Internet regardless of their location.

For workers who want to work with daily tasks from a single place, their requirements can be met with SharePoint. This eliminates spreading information across multiple sites and applications.

SharePoint customization on dedicated servers make SharePoint sites more intuitive and easy to use for everyone in your company.

PlexHosted offers dedicated SharePoint servers that can be configured to meet all company requirements, so the server’s resources can grow as the company grows.

With a dedicated SharePoint environment, you can integrate SharePoint 2013 with other systems or social sites.

Considering the information you have read about SharePoint, the primary reason to invest in dedicated SharePoint hosting 2013 is your company can build, configure and manage its own SharePoint environment without developing a custom code solution. A dedicated SharePoint environment provides full control where custom solutions are deployed.

Start with the PlexHosted dedicated SharePoint hosting today and improve your business tomorrow!